#oneaday, Day 111: Chaos, The Battle of Wizards

It’s a sad but true fact that returning to the games of your youth usually ends in disappointment as you realise that gaming has moved on a lot, and those games never got a re-release on Xbox Live Arcade or the like for a very good reason — they’re not very good.

But there’s a few exceptions. Specifically, anything made by Julian Gollop is still just as fresh as it was back then.

How do I know this? Thanks to the Elite ZX Spectrum Collection app for iPhone. This app features a decent Spectrum emulator and a selection of games, most of which can be bought via in-app purchase in packs of six. One such pack is a Julian Gollop pack, which contains five fantastic strategy games and one utterly awful bouncy-ball atrocity, the less said about which the better. At least — hopefully — after that, Gollop figured out what he was good at and what he wasn’t.

The games included in the pack are Chaos, Lords of Chaos, Rebelstar and its sequel and Laser Squad. I can’t remember what the bouncy one is called but it involved catching balloons and wasn’t fun at all.

The strategy games, on the other hand, are another matter. Chaos is the simplest of the bunch, with Teletext-quality graphics and feeble beep-and-fart type sound effects, but it’s an immensely competitive game that supports up to eight players. It works well as a “pass the phone” game, too. And casting a Gooey Blob that gets out of hand never gets old.

The remaining games are all fundamentally very similar, featuring the same basic gameplay mechanics and gradually-improving graphics. In fact, if you’ve played the X-COM games, you’ve played these games too. That’s no bad thing, though, because X-COM is awesome. Featuring turn-based multiplayer action, they’re, in many ways, virtual boardgames that don’t demand any throwing of dice or getting out a billion pieces or avoiding bumping the table or spilling curry on them or anything like that. And the Spectrum controls, while a little clunky, manage to work pretty effectively on the iPhone app. It helps that the keys are labelled, rather than my first experience with Chaos on a PC based emulator, where my friend Sam and I spent a good half an hour or so attempting to work out by trial and error what keys did what.

So if you’re jonesing for more X-COM and don’t object to playing on a touchscreen, then grab the Elite ZX Spectrum Collection and the Julian Gollop pack. I can guarantee that you won’t be disappointed, and you’ll be surprised that retro gaming can still be fun, deep and rewarding rather than vaguely upsetting.

Day 459

#oneaday Day 110: Private Hysteria

Earlier today, a story broke which caused a fresh round of privacy concerns, as it was revealed that the iPhone is, in fact, recording where you’ve been and storing that information in its backup file that it transfers to your computer every time you sync it. Here’s the story from the Telegraph’s “Technolgoy Consultant” (a typo which doesn’t immediately inspire me with confidence) — judge for yourself.

Here’s my take, and I understand completely you may not feel the same way: I don’t give a damn. Why should I? What possible use could that information serve? What could people find out that I haven’t already made abundantly clear via other means of social media? That I like to drive to Southampton a lot? That I tend to prefer Costa Coffee as my coffee outlet of choice? That I have been known to drive to Tesco in the dead of night for groceries and snacks?

“But, privacy,” people bleat, without really explaining what they mean. Well, what about privacy? The minute you connect a device to the Internet, you’re putting yourself on display. The minute you use your GPS-enabled phone to find out where the hell you are and where you should be going, someone knows where you are. The minute you search “oily lesbian midgets” on Google, someone knows what a complete pervert you are. If you’re that concerned about privacy, you should reconsider your decision to carry around a constantly Internet-connected device with satellite tracking in your pocket. Or at least turn the fucking thing off.

Most of the time, though, the hysteria over privacy seems to be worry for the sake of worry. Take the app Color which came out a while back, for example. Color is, in theory, a clever way for people in the same place to collect the candid mobile photos they snap of an event — and possibly meet new people. It does this through a variety of means — GPS tracking if possible, then Wi-Fi identifications, mobile phone base stations and even recording the background noise when you take the photo and comparing it to the noise print taken when other people take photos. My first reaction on hearing how it worked was “Jesus Christ, that’s clever,” followed by “but ultimately unnecessary as most people I know with iPhones will just immediately upload their photos to Facebook anyway.” My immediate reaction was not “Shit! My iPhone is recording me without telling me! Bastards!” — which was the reaction of a few people I spoke to about it.

Why, though? Why the panic? It’s just sound. Are you a secret agent? Probably not. And if you were, it’s unlikely you’d be using social media to share photos on your iPhone. Again, what possible sinister use could the recording of background noise have? Could advertisers figure out that you like hanging out in noisy places and start providing you with targeted AdSense ads for earplugs and ear drops? Perhaps. But again: so what?

The main objection seems to be that the device is doing this without the user’s knowledge. But I even can’t see the problem with this, really. If you’re going somewhere you shouldn’t be or doing something/one you shouldn’t be, then don’t take an Internet-connected GPS-enabled device with you that — shock horror — might know where you are. And for fuck’s sake, don’t check in on Foursquare while you’re at your bit on the side’s house. It’s always your choice. If you want to be part of the digital revolution, then you have to get used to the fact that your information is out there for as long as you’re connected to the Internet.

Potential spoilarz for Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story ahead.

If you’ve played Christine Love’s Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story, you’ll know that the culmination of the plot deals with this very issue — the supposed “erosion of privacy”. The young characters in the game have grown up with this attitude to data, and as such are not surprised to know that other people are looking at their theoretically “private” information — and indeed take full advantage of this fact. I’m starting to feel like I can understand their attitude somewhat. I’m not sure if I should be pleased about that, or if I should be more worried than I am that my iPhone knows how many times I’ve been to public toilets in the last year.

Ah well. Can always turn it off. At least until The Machines take over.

#oneaday Day 90: You’ll Never Win

Got an iPhone or some sort of portable telecommunications device which supports push notifications? Take a look at its home screen and count how many notifications you’ve got. Not counting emails, I have 39, and I know the second I go through all those apps and “clear” them, they’ll be back with a vengeance.

The same is true with emails. My inbox count on my iPhone has been hovering at somewhere around the 650-700 mark for a long time now, and there seems to be absolutely no way to shrink it down. My GMail button in Chrome claims I have 948 messages, but I think that’s the total in my inbox, not unread. And like the notifications, I know that as soon as I batter the shit out of my inbox and get that number down to something approaching zero (it can never be zero, because there’s always at least one message you find that you think “I’ll just leave that in my inbox, I might want to refer to that later”, conveniently forgetting the fact you have labels, folders and a search facility) those messages will be back to haunt me. Well, not those same messages, but some new ones.

It’s the age of Web 2.0 that has done this to us, of course. The fact that we get bombarded with messages from various social networks on a minute-by-minute basis, everything vying for our attention (when in fact most of these emails are asinine, vapid crap that we really don’t need — who gives a fuck if someone just commented on a photo you were tagged in? Check it later.) and, in many cases, causing the important stuff to get lost.

I remember back in the CompuServe days, receiving an email was A Big Deal (particularly if it was from Julia, at least until The Incident) because it didn’t necessarily happen every day. Largely because not everyone Had The Internet, because some people didn’t have a modem, or others were concerned about phone bills, or whatever. But at that time — oh, that golden time — you were lucky to get five emails a week, and certainly none inviting you to extend your penis with Biblical quotes (and no, sadly I’m not making that up).

I guess the solution would be, of course, to turn off notifications and to stop Twitter, Facebook and whatever else from emailing me every time someone in my network does ANYTHING… but then how will I know that someone just tagged me in 300 photos? (With an email for every photo, obv.)

In other news, it’s probably about time I cleaned out my aforementioned GMail inbox. I’m going in… if you don’t hear from me in 3 hours I’ve probably died.

#oneaday Day 77: Updates Are Available

Remember when we didn’t have to update things? I do. It was a good time. You could put something in to your computer or console, safe in the knowledge that it (probably) worked… and if it didn’t work, it would probably get recalled and/or refunded. It was a binary state. In the world of consoles, this situation prevailed until the last generation ended—the era of the 360 and PS3 ushered in the Age of the Patch.

Of course, PC users have been dealing with this for considerably longer. Anyone who has ever used Windows will be intimately familiar with the incremental update process. It just used to happen slightly less regularly before we had the Internet there with easy access. You might get a disc (or huge pile of floppy disks) with an updated version on providing significant new features, rather than just plugging Security Hole Number 5,237,429.

Nowhere is “update culture” more apparent than in the world of smartphone apps. It’s like keeping on top of your email inbox—you’ll never beat it. Update everything on your phone and within an hour or two at least one app will have been updated with either “bug fixes” or “AMAZING NEW FEATURES”. And people have come to expect, nay, demand these updates. Read reviews in the App Store (I know, I know) and you’ll see products which have just been released with consumers demanding updates.

Of course, you don’t have to update things when they come up. People who don’t have an Internet connection don’t, of course. And in theory, this shouldn’t cause much of an issue—unless you own an Apple device.

I’ve become convinced with the past few iOS updates that Steve Jobs has a big magic “obsolescence” button in his office that immediately renders all iOS-based devices nigh-on unusable unless they’re running the absolute latest version of the system software—even if they were happily working just fine the day before.

You may accuse me of paranoia at this juncture, and it wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption. However, let me cite the example of last night to you. Last night, Twitter for iPhone started playing silly buggers and decided to start crashing every five seconds. I deleted and reinstalled it and still it had trouble. So I downloaded Echofon instead. This ran, but slowly and jerkily. Given that I’m running an iPhone 4, supposedly THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE UNIVERSE (Smartphone. I meant smartphone.) the word “slowdown” really shouldn’t be in the vocabulary I use when talking about it. But slowdown there was. And lo, it was annoying.

It then occurred to me that I hadn’t updated to iOS 4.3, which came out a few days earlier. So I quickly (ha!) updated my phone. And wouldn’t you know, everything suddenly, magically ran the way it was supposed to. How about that?

So, the moral of this story, then, is update your shit. Otherwise the CEOs of the world will enjoy torturing you from afar.

#oneaday Day 64: Welcome to Bullet Hell

David Cage, of Heavy Rain fame, recently made some comments at GDC regarding traditional game structure. He argued that levels, bosses, missions, that sort of thing—all of them were obsolete, and that we should move on. Now, in some senses, I kind of agree with him—I certainly want to play more games like Heavy Rain for one thing—but to say that traditional structural devices in games should be left behind forever is foolish and misguided.

Why? Well, because there’s still a place for gamey-games. Not everything has to be an epic interactive movie that is beautifully crafted and cinematographatised. Not everything has to be about in-depth moral decisions and the consequences of those actions. It’s okay to chase high-scores, and it’s okay to put the words “GAME OVER” in front of the player if they mess up.

The reason why this has suddenly popped into my mind is the fact that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of the “bullet hell” shooter last night. I’d heard a few good things about the recently-released Deathsmiles on Xbox, and asked a few people on Twitter what they thought. Everyone who got back to me said that it was an excellent game, and also recommended a couple of iPhone titles—Espgaluda II and Dodonpachi Resurrection. It was too late to go and grab a copy of Deathsmiles thanks to the fact most of the country shuts down at around 6pm, but I could at least try the iPhone games. And they had Lite versions for trial purposes, too, which makes a nice change.

I tried them both and was astonished at how impressive 2D pixel art can still be. Neither game is consciously trying to look “retro”, they’re just made of well-drawn, well-animated art rather than 3D graphics. Not only that, though, they’re a huge amount of fun to play. I’d always figured the “bullet hell” shooter as being punishingly difficult—otherwise the word “hell” wouldn’t figure into its genre description, surely—but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that rather than being super-difficult, they’re just quite technical and require rather more than hosepiping the screen with laser fire. Instead, it’s a case of quickly determining what the best route through the bajillion incoming shots is—and the excellent touch-screen controls on the iPhone games (worthy of celebration in itself) makes navigating through them a snap.

The other thing I hadn’t realised about the genre is that the “hitbox” (the area of the ship that registers collisions) is super-tiny—much smaller than the ship itself. This means that you can get away with “scraping” bullets and, in fact, in one mode of Dodonpachi Resurrection, this is encouraged by building up your score multiplier. And speaking of scores, if you’re the sort of person who likes building up gigantic scores, this is the genre for you. Both the iPhone games have full OpenFeint and Game Center support, a bunch of Achievements and full Leaderboard functionality, with an individual Leaderboard for each mode—hopefully free of the sort of cheating we see on the Fruit Ninja leaderboards.

The final thing that I find particularly noteworthy is the fact that the inappropriateness of the music throughout is second only to DEADLY PREMONITION. Check out this music from the first stage of Dodonpachi Resurrection and I defy you to not be smiling by the end of it. Now imagine blowing up like a million tanks whilst listening to that. Yeah. That’s why that game is awesome, and why @feenwager will hate it.

#oneaday, Day 280: Run, Jedi, Run

So I know you’re dying to know how my running is going. What’s that? You aren’t? Well tough luck, sonny, I’m going to tell you anyway.

For those of you joining me in this post… first of all, welcome HELLOTO YOUHUGSANDKISSES and secondly… I’ve been following the Couch 2 5K running programme for the last 5 weeks. This programme, originally recommended to me by the fine example of gentlemanhood that is Mr Calin Grajko, aims to get lazy bastards up and running a 5K in the space of nine weeks. It does this by doing a gradually-intensifying programme of walks and runs.

The programme starts with you running for 1 minute, then walking for 1.5 minutes, 8 times. The second week gets you running for 1.5 minutes, then walking for 2 minutes, 6 times. The third week has you alternating running 1.5 minutes and walking for 1.5 minutes, then running 3 minutes and walking 3 minutes, twice. The fourth week, which I’ve just completed, sees you alternating running 3 minutes and walking 1.5 minutes, then running 5 minutes and walking 2.5 minutes, twice. And this week, which I’ve just returned from the first run of, sees me running for 5 minutes and walking for 3 minutes, three times.

As you can see, the programme gradually increases in intensity a little bit at a time. It’s paced so well that if you stick with it, the actual relative difficulty of each week remains the same. So while you may be panting and wheezing after the first run of week 1, it’ll seem like a cakewalk by the time you’re running for 5 minute bursts in week 5. It’s excellent motivation because it lets you see exactly how much you’re improving. When I think back to the end of September, when I started, there’s no way I could have even contemplated running for 5 minutes at a time. Even the 1 minute runs of the first week were a daunting prospect. But now, a minute of running is child’s play.

This is partly due to improved stamina and partly due to you getting to know your body a bit better (in a non-masturbatory sense) and being aware of your limits. As you become aware of said limits, you learn to pace yourself effectively to be able to carry yourself through each zone of intense exercise.

And sure, I’m still slow as hell, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s giving me a workout and I can feel it having an effect. At the beginning of week 1, I was slow and incapable of running for more than a minute at a time. Now, at the beginning of week 5, I may still be slow, but I can keep it going for some time. Once the stamina is there, the speed can be worked on.

I have to say, the use of gadgetry to help with all this has been a key motivational factor. My iPhone comes with me on every run, along with the RunKeeper and Get Running apps. RunKeeper keeps track of your time, pace, distance and draws a handy map of your route. This will come in particularly handy once I’m trying to improve speed rather than stamina. In the meantime, it’s a means of drawing geographical penises across Google Maps.

Get Running is the key app, though, and I’ve mentioned it before on here, I know, but it’s worth talking about again. It’s a very simple app, being essentially a glorified stopwatch, but it’s put together so elegantly and produced so slickly that it’s an excellent aid to the inherent motivation of the Couch 2 5K programme. The recorded coaching is delivered with feeling and makes you feel like you have an actual trainer with you, encouraging you and spurring you on to the next milestone. It reminds you how far you’ve come since the beginning at the end of each session, tells you at just the right moment that you have “only a minute of running left” and so on. It’s a really excellent app and comes highly recommended to anyone interested in following the programme.

So that’s that. Exercise without an expensive gym membership to worry about. All it cost was the price of a simple iPhone app which, if you’ve got a stopwatch, you don’t even need. Plus it’s an excuse to get out and about and explore your area, which is a particularly pleasant thing to do out in the countryside.

So wish me luck in the next few weeks of the programme as I get ever-closer to the elusive 5K. It seems a long way off now but, given the progress I’ve made so far, it certainly seems to be within reach.

#oneaday, Day 270: Go Go Gadget, uhh, Gadget

I love gadgets. Anyone who knows me in “real life” will not be surprised by this revelation. But I’m always impressed by quite how much we can do with various little portable implements these days. And even not quite so recently, too.

The most recent mind-blowing moment I had was during this last week when I had my little expedition to the woods. I was standing in the middle of a forest with absolutely no trace of civilisation except a little crude wooden bench by the side of the muddy path. And somehow I had better mobile signal than I do in the house I’m sitting right now. So, without thinking, I popped out my iPhone and fired up eBuddy to say hello to my buddy Chris in California. He responded back and we had a nice discussion about music.

Let’s just think about that a minute. I was in the middle of a wood in Cambridgeshire, England. Chris was somewhere in sunny California. And yet there we were, chatting away like this was a perfectly normal thing to do. That’s awesome.

One of my favourite gadget moments, though, was a good few years back now. I was up in Edinburgh at the Fringe with the Southampton University Theatre Group, or “Rattlesnake!” as we’d inexplicably decided to call ourselves. At the time, I had somehow managed to end up with the responsibility of keeping the Theatre Group website up to date. I’d prepared a special Edinburgh page and everything, and I decided that it would be pretty awesome to keep an online diary. The concept of “blogging” was but a pipe dream for all but the biggest nerds (even bigger than me) at this point. And doing so via a mobile device was absolutely out of the question.

I did, however, have my Palm Tungsten with me, to date my second-favourite gadget after my iPhone. You could play Shining Force on it, for heaven’s sake. That’s awesome, if beside the point. No, the reason my Palm came in handy was that I could type up my diary entries into the Notes application on it and then use the handily-provided SD card (32MB!) to transfer said material to a computer in the conveniently-located Internet café we found one day.

One may ask why I didn’t just type said diary entries straight into the computers. Well, the advantage of doing it on the Palm was that I could write things as they happened. I could write a rehearsal report. I could write what we were up to in the park. I could write about flyering the Royal Mile. The Frankenstein pub. (AMAZING) Being on top of Arthur’s Seat drinking sake as the sun rose. (DOUBLEPLUSAMAZING)

Sure, I could have written about these things after the fact. But the immediacy of being able to write about it there and then was pretty damn cool. Each new generation of gadgets makes this sort of thing easier and easier to do. And while it has its downsides—the sea of people filming concerts on their mobile phones instead of actually watching the damn things being one—on the whole I think it’s really great to be able to share life’s exciting little moments (or, in the case of some of you out there, the details of your latest bowel movements) with people that you care about it. Of course some of this is vanity. But the other side of it is being able to share things with people that you don’t get to hang out with as often as you like.

So gadgets are awesome. For everyone. Not just nerds.

#oneaday, Day 156: Could It Be…?

Today was, I hesitate to say it, a good day. Yes, I woke up a bit late and had trouble getting out of bed before 10AM, but things picked up a bit from there. First thing that happened was a certain website that I’d expressed an interest in freelancing for several months back emailed me back enquiring about my availability. I responded that I was very much available. As a result of a rather lengthy exchange, as it turns out, I’m taking a little trip tomorrow to go and cover something. Further details as events warrant. But that’s very exciting, and could potentially be something of a big break. Let’s hope so.

Then, a little later in the day, I received a lovely Facebook message from someone who shall remain nameless to spare her blushes. She said some nice things about some of the things I’ve written in the past and, as she said in her message, it’s always nice when someone compliments and appreciates your work.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a normal day without something rubbish happening, so I lost my passport and have a horrible feeling it might have accidentally got thrown out with the trash when I cleared out my car of teaching crap the other week. If you’re wondering why my passport was even in my car in the first place, it’s because schools are very strict on seeing official ID when supply teachers turn up. Quite right, too, otherwise any idiot with a beard could turn up and start shouting at children. Still, after some frantic and panicked research, it seems that for domestic flights photo ID in the form of a photocard driving licence is enough to prove you are who you say you are. So that should—hopefully—be all right. If it’s not, then, well, you know what tomorrow’s #oneaday is going to be about! And I will, of course, be applying for a new passport with due haste. Unless it randomly turns up somewhere as these things are wont to do.

I also updated to iOS4 last night. Because I’m still using a 3G, I don’t get a lot of the cool new features that secretly I don’t really care about, like multitasking and a background to my Home screen. I do, however, get folders, and that’s been a godsend. Whereas once I had six pages of apps that were once organised but as new ones were added and old ones deleted gradually got more and more disorganised, now I have one Home screen with everything on it. I tweeted it earlier. I can’t be bothered to go and find the picture again so if you’re that interested in other people’s iPhone Home screens, go rummage back through my Twitter feed for today.

So anyway. Tomorrow and Thursday should both be very interesting. More news as it happens. Or more likely, after it happens. Right now? I am very sleepy after trying to play doctor on someone else’s poor crippled iPhone. We failed in our efforts, sadly, so the fine people at the Apple Store WestQuay are getting a visit from them tomorrow.

#oneaday, Day 114: Social Peril

My good friend Mr George Kokoris had this to say about people and social media earlier. Go read it. He has some very valid concerns, especially in light of Facebook’s increasingly cavalier attitude towards personal privacy.

I used to like Facebook. I used to like it because it wasn’t like MySpace – I remember saying this to several people. I tried MySpace and didn’t really get it. It seemed to be a friend-collecting competition with some of the most hideous web design you can possibly imagine. Facebook used to be different, though. It used to limit you to people you actually know. In fact, you used to have to say how you knew the person you were adding as a friend, much like immensely boring but practical professional networking site LinkedIn still does. As a result, it became a great way for keeping in touch with family and friends. Everyone felt confident and secure in the fact that your information was yours, and that the only people you were sharing it with were people you had specifically approved. In short, it felt like a secure means of communication. I liked it for this.

As time passed, we all know the story. Groups. Applications. Pages. A dwindling sense of security. Employers using employees photographs of drunken nights out as grounds to mistreat them. Until we reach today, when a large number of people I know are seriously considering ditching their Facebook accounts altogether in favour of alternative, more secure means of communication. Or, ironically, Twitter, one of the most open and public means of communication there is.

But at least on Twitter it never claims to be anything other than public. Your profile on Twitter consists of your avatar, your username and 140 characters of “bio”. Your conversations are public (unless you specifically choose to protect your tweets, which kind of defeats one of the main objects of the service) and anyone can chip in at any time. It’s a simple, effective means of asynchronous communication which means that people speak frankly, briefly and candidly.

This gets people in trouble. Sometimes, a lot of trouble. Paul Chambers found this out the hard way.

“Robin Hood airport is closed,” he tweeted as his trip to Ireland to meet a girl he’d been talking to on Twitter looked threatened by the UK’s complete inability to deal with a bit of snow. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

A flippant, offhand remark. But a flippant, offhand remark that recently landed him with a thousand-pound fine and a criminal record on the grounds that his message was “grossly offensive, or of indecent, obscene, or menacing character”. A flippant, offhand remark that gave him the dubious honour of being the first person ever to be convicted of a “crime” (and I use the term loosely) in connection with remarks made on a social networking site.

I mean seriously. His comments weren’t in the best taste. But by successfully prosecuting this case, it sets a dangerous precedent that has made everyone rather more conscious of what they say. In effect, it’s stifling free speech, a concept the Internet is built upon – not to mention the fact that the life of Chambers, who was training to be an accountant, has now been devastated.

See also: Gizmodo’s behaviour with regard to the new iPhone that was left in a bar. Gray Powell, the engineer who misplaced the phone, lost his job, perhaps understandably, given that he left an immensely valuable trade secret just lying around. Gizmodo reported on the new iPhone. They ripped it open and looked inside it. Perhaps not the best thing to do when Apple were already pissed off. Then they ripped open Gray Powell’s life, using information from his entire Internet presence to make him a global laughingstock. Was it not enough that the guy fucked up and lost his job because of it? Apparently not.

George points out that there are people out there who hate success and will do anything to destroy the efforts of people with ambition. It makes me sad to think that in a world where our exchange of information should be free and open that incidents like the above can happen. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. The fact that we can communicate instantaneously with anyone in the world should be a wonderful, life-affirming thing that brings the global community closer together, builds bridges and draws us closer to a peaceful sci-fi utopia. But instead, shit like this just gets people paranoid and worried, until we’re going to find ourselves even more closed off and isolated than we were before the whole social media thing started. And that’s sad.

Is it just human nature to use things that should be positive for evil, deceitful purposes?

#oneaday, Day 103: Synchronise… Watches!

Anyone who’s got friends in other countries, something which has become more and more likely with the rise of online social networking, will know how difficult it is to do things together sometimes. Different time zones, the fact that you’re not “just around the corner” from one another – all manner of factors conspire to ensure that arranging a friendly game of Modern Warfare or Fat Princess, let alone anything more adventurous, is tricky business.

So what’s the solution? Well, how about if you don’t actually have to be online at the same time as each other to play together? It’s obviously not quite the same as actually being able to talk smack live to each other, but it’s a start. And it’s a gaming trend which is growing.

Many iPhone and iPad owners have been enjoying Words with Friends, a Scrabble clone with a different board layout to avoid difficult copyright negotiations. Words with Friends gets this idea of asynchronous multiplayer just right. Play a move and a pop-up push notification is sent to your opponent that it’s their turn. They can play their turn whenever is convenient to them. Then the notification is sent back to you. There’s also a chat window in game, where messages can be left for the other player. If you want to both stay logged in and play in real-time, there’s nothing stopping you doing that. But if, like most people, time is of the essence and you don’t have a spare hour for a friendly game, you can spread your game over the course of several days, weeks, months as necessary.

Obviously this works great for turn-based games, but what about genres which are traditionally real-time? Take racing games, for example.

Well, here’s a clever solution. The rather literally-titled Async Racing allows players to compete against each other without being logged in at the same time. The way it does this is by recording players’ laps around the game’s tracks and then using these recorded laps as opponents when someone decides to enter a race. Mario Kart Wii did something similar some time back with its Mario Kart Channel functionality, and it proved rather successful for a while, at least among my friends and I.

Then there’s Geometry Wars 2, perhaps the best – and simplest – example of asynchronous multiplayer fun. By posting one of your friends’ scores in the upper-right corner of your screen at all times during gameplay, you’re always competing against someone else. Assuming you actually have some friends, of course.

While asynchronous multiplayer is never going to completely take the place of simultaneous play complete with all the trash-talking that entails, it’s certainly an attractive alternative for those who are either short on time or friends in the same time zone. It’ll be interesting to see how – or indeed if – it will translate to other genres.

One possibility is for it to use the behavioural analysis that Halo: Reach is supposedly going to pioneer for its matchmaking. Imagine being able to party up with an AI team in something like World of Warcraft made up of your friends’ personalities, or have a game of Call of Duty against bots based on behavioural analysis of your buddies. Sure, it’s not a patch on actually being there with your friends, but we’ve established that isn’t always an option for some people.

Games are more fun with friends, whether they can be there with you or not. New opportunities to “play” with people you wouldn’t normally get to should be embraced. Asynchronous play is going to be a big part of the future of gaming, and it’ll be interesting to see who gets it right first.